ANTHONYRUGGERI.COM - Essay: Capitalism and Automation

Capitalism and Automation

As I write this essay, all the news stories seem to indicate that our economy is on the mend and that the dot-bomb recession is moving behind us. Unfortunately, the unemployment rate is not really going down. This got me to wondering about something.

"Productivity" has been the big economic buzzword for a long time. Productivity is good because it enables people and companies to do more with less. A lot of the people who lost their jobs when the dot-com bubble burst and during the most recent recession are still out of jobs. That is no doubt true because economic growth is not yet sufficient to outpace the gains in productivity, so basically, the economy doesn't need those people to grow at its current pace. I won't go into how I think the whole thing is a Ponzi scheme that will eventually collapse on itself (people need to buy more so the economy will grow so people will have work so they can buy more so...), but then again, maybe I will.

In case it has not been obvious, computation and automation are having gigantic and far-reaching effects on the world economy, equal to or perhaps surpassing the effects felt during the early days of the Industrial Revolution. The difference this time is that machines are replacing not only human physical labor, but human intellectual labor as well. Human productivity is going up because machines (whether "dumb" machines, computers, or robots) are doing more and more of the work. The problem is that all the people are still here.

What happens when the machines evolve to the point where they can pretty much do anything that people can do, and for less money? In a world where machines do all the work, what do people do all day, and more importantly, who pays them for it?

Capitalism is based on the concept of compensation in return for perceived value. If the human beings of the future can't deliver any value that cannot be provided more cheaply and easily by a machine, what happens to them? What happens to capitalism, for that matter? Physical ability is certainly no longer something you can market. The days of getting any kind of decent job digging ditches, in all but the poorest of third-world countries, are over. The days of being paid to "think" may be numbered, as computers get faster and faster and we better understand analytical intelligence. Are creative computers far behind? Compassionate computers? Given how readily younger generations take to technology, is it inconceivable for suitably designed robots to take the place of the human touch and eliminate what may be the last bastion of human value, interpersonal relationships?

I have never considered myself a Luddite, but questions like this give me pause. I have always seen the future as a technological one, with technology solving many of our problems. Over the years, as I have witnessed the fragility of systems built by humans, I doubt our ability to do a good job with the technology, and at the same time I see many more of the problems that progressive technological sophistication may solve. The Industrial Revolution may actually have been a blip on the radar compared to the social upheaval that may result from the proliferation of machines that can both work and think. While machines have replaced human muscle, they have not yet replaced the human brain, at least for all but the most disadvantaged members of our species. When machines do replace the human brain, what will humans have left? If our society is any indication, the future looks dark. Already our economy is abstracted to the point where production is valued less than the compensation for it. The stock markets have become a gigantic entertainment apparatus for those who like to play with money. The steadily increasing appetite for entertainment is fed with a meny of increasingly vapid choices.

I won't pretend that there aren't "solutions" for this problem. People may become cyborgs and thus better equipped to compete with the new races of machines. We are already reprogramming our biology with anti-depressants to make ourselves happy with the way things are, instead of trying to make the world a place where we can be happy without them. Will we all wind up in a state of mindless near-catatonia as in Ray Bradbury's classic Fahrenheit 451, or perhaps in a perpetual state of drug-induced stupor as in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World?